Social networking and photo sharing sites have become popular for maintaining and expanding relationships. These sites are typically online platforms that are dedicated to building and maintaining the social networks or social relations among people by providing systems for sharing information to many people without taking the time to contact these people directly. In many cases, the relationships are established among users who share experiences, common interests, and/or activities.
Many of these sites allow users to create profiles with a variety of information that can be shared with other users; however, these sites usually have privacy controls that allow users to choose who can view their profile, contact them, etc. Through these profiles, the users can upload pictures and movies, share information about their lives, create blog entries, indicate interests of the user, communicate in real-time with other users, comment on content of users, and the like. For example, social networking sites allow for friends (e.g., high school classmates) to remain connected, interact, and share pictures, home movies, interests, hobbies, favorite movies, favorite books, favorite television shows, and other information about their lives.
Most photo sharing and social network sites and applications use commenting and linking as the form of feedback for interaction among the users. On many sites there are dedicated sections for comments from users. However, the dedicated section for comments and linking found in these sites and applications often do not capture all the information about interactions that a user might desire. As such, there are a number of challenges and inefficiencies found in traditional photo sharing and social networking sites.